I had not realized just how much of a market had developed for historic log cabins. Old log houses. Antique log buildings. Pioneer log homes. Whatever you want to call them.

I’ve been fascinated with pioneers’ cabins since I was a kid. When I was in 4th grade, my dad rented an old farmhouse near Deer Creek State Park in Ohio. The farmhouse itself was unremarkable, but I was awestruck when Dad showed me a rear “addition” on the house that was actually an old pioneer’s cabin. He opened his back door, and there in front of me was a “room” with very wide floor boards (sagging, actually), massive hand-hewed log beams across the ceiling, and the same huge, squared logs forming the walls. It also had a rustic old ladder to a loft/2nd room above. It was like I had stepped back in time 160 years. To me, already a history geek back then, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Someone had built Dad’s farmhouse as an addition to a much older log cabin. I’ve always figured the cabin to be from the very early 1800s– which was pretty darn early in Ohio’s frontier days, since Ohio wasn’t even settled really until the 1790s and didn’t become a state until 1803 (and even then with only 60,000 people or so). Who knows how long the tiny log house was lived in, but we’d occasionally find glass shards in the field directly behind the old cabin, and once, I even found an old, chipped Indian arrowhead in a freshly-plowed wheat field behind the cabin (imagine the scenes racing through my head after finding that!). Two decades later (long after Dad had moved elsewhere), imagine my disappointment when I heard that the old farmhouse had burned down. Completely gone. And as you might imagine, the biggest loss in my eyes was the old log house that had been attached. I now wish I had pictures of it.

Anyway, fast forward to this week. Someone near my current hometown in Ohio was recently dismantling an old barn & uncovered an old log building (the barn had been built around it, kinda like Dad’s farmhouse had been built onto the old cabin). In a local newspaper story, the owners offered to sell it to anyone interested. This brought back memories and prompted me to search online to see if I could find similar historic/old log cabins for sale on the interwebs. And WOW! There’s a LOT out there. A reclamation industry has developed around the dismantling & rebuilding of old log cabins/carriage barns, outbuildings, etc. Which I am all for, since it at least preserves the old log structures rather than them rotting into the ground or being bulldozed into oblivion. I presume people usually re-build the cabins as neat additions on newer homes or as unique outbuildings or guest houses (In fact, click this link to see a wonderful re-building of the cabin pictured just above, left).

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[…] 19th century. But even without that historical importance, it’s a cool-looking log cabin (See my older posting about log cabins here) in the heart of Gettysburg — touted as “the most famous small town in America!“ […]

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